To answer the questions established in the beginning, a frame needs to established. In this case, it is the commissioner, the Company and its Project management discipline.
The Company describes it is core business in several business processes, which are called key processes and support processes. Two of the key processes mentioned earlier, the project management process and the change management process are directly governing what is done within project management.
These main processes are high level in a way that many of the tasks or steps are not fully described and thus are sub-processes. These sub-processes are not described in a way that they could be used for RPA and for that, more information is needed. This missing information seemed to be partly silent. Thus interviews and survey methods were used to collect more information about the processes and tasks that are explicitly done using computers.
Another reason for information gathering is the possible benefits of RPA. Many of the benefits of RPA relate to cost reductions by means of improved efficiency and productivity. For that reason, in both the interviews and the survey, questions were made about how much time different activities take.
4.1 Project management handbook at the Company
The Company’s operational handbook covers project delivery and includes two key processes related to operative projects, process management process and change management process.
Figure 2. Project management project phases (the Company 2019)
The Company’s project management follows a very common project management process groups. These five groups are named in Figure 2, which is describing project phases and their relation in a general and simplified view. The Company’s process management process describes the main flow of the process. Additionally, it has written descriptions for major steps and also gives main documentation, data management and deliverables within the project. (The Company 2019)
The change management process is described similarly as the project management process. But compared to the project management process, it is simpler and more streamlined. The amount of documentation, data management and deliverables are also less.
4.2 Interviews
Because company processes were not fully described on the task level, it was clear that an effort was needed to find out what is done with computers in the Company’s operative projects. Therefore, interviews were selected as an information gathering method
because of the nature of the information, which was mostly hidden knowledge and not written in any guides, handbooks or instructions.
Target was to find out tasks and processes that operative project managers and members would do in their projects that would involve mainly manual information and data management with computers. These tasks and processes would then be evaluated in terms of how good fit they would be for RPA.
Four persons were interviewed from various discipline, experience and competence level. The interview itself was a casual type of discussion where the topic was guided by the interviewer towards the point of interest. Appendix 1 lists the orienting questions and guides that were used as support for the interviews to help stay in proper topics.
Interviews were recorded and transcribed. Transcriptions were condensed and partly interpreted to keep the focus on topics related to this study. In the recorded interviews, there were a lot of discussions and topics that do not serve the purpose of this study at all. operative projects. With this information, it would be possible to estimate some benefits that a robot would bring in a similar task. Additionally, how people perceive these tasks in terms of importance and mundanity, gives us some perspective on the frustration that a task might give people. A survey was conducted for the purpose of getting baseline information.
The survey was constructed so that the first two questions align the participant into the subject, which is manual work done with computers in operative projects. The following question, after that, asks participants to evaluate how much time, most time-consuming tasks take. The final question asks participants to evaluate tasks that they feel are meaningless or futile and then describe them more closely. There was a challenge to build up the questions so that they would guide the participant into the right way of
thinking without already giving the answers to them. Survey questions are shown in Appendix 2.
As a last question, it was asked if the participant wanted to discuss more about the topic.
Several persons gave their name and email for the purpose. An additional interview was arranged with those persons. Discussions in those were based on the questions in the survey. The interviews were recorded as well and transcribed similarly as the original interviews.
4.4 Evaluation of the data and information from interviews and survey
The interviews
The first set of interviews (four interviews conducted in 2017 and 2018) were evaluated as a one group. The second set of interviews, conducted in 2019, were evaluated and added to the list of findings, if any new findings were made.
The primary result of these interviews is a list of processes or tasks that these persons are doing with computers while they are executing operative projects in the project team as a project manager or as a member of the team. These processes or tasks found, and selected into the list, are directly related to project management. There were also discussions about processes and tasks that are not related to project management, but to the deliverables of the project. An example of such a process or task would be document delivery to the customer. It is often handled by the project team, but it is part of the delivery process and not the project management process. Also, the detailed way of working is often agreed during the project execution and, as such, is not even a stable process or task. These discussions and results were excluded completely from the scope of this study.
The most common finding from the interviews was that on the project management level, in the project team, the interviewees are mostly doing reporting related tasks, both internal and external reporting. According to the interviewees, the current way of reporting did not seem to be standardized throughout the disciplines and projects and although few of the interviewees referred to the same report, when shown, the reports were slightly different. In terms of RPA, non-standardized reporting, makes use of automation more difficult. Three different types of reports were identified and in all of
those, the mechanism to fill them up was similar. They were filled up with information that was already collected and stored digitally on other locations. Time used to fill up those reports varied from tens of minutes to two hours, depending mostly on the complexity of the project.
Other notable findings were related to project scheduling, resource tasking, project initiation and document creation. All of these are done manually and can potentially save several hours per project when automated. One more worth mentioning is a task done on some product care type of task, which is handled like a project. Resources working on this project are logging hours in several systems. These hours are then checked and compared that they are the same and correct in each system. An error of half an hour in the logged hours may cause several hours of manual work to check and identify the error. A simple task that would be done within minutes if automated to a robot.
None of these processes and tasks found are recorded in the Company’s handbooks properly. Within this study and interviews, they were not mapped and the processes or tasks remains mostly unknown in the details. Within the findings, it was also not clear if different people were talking about the same reports in each case. The finding is that we do manual reporting in project management that could be automated as well as some other processes and tasks that have the potential to save resources, decrease costs and improve quality.
The survey
The survey was sent to 60 people and 26 of them replied. All of the questions are shown in Appendix 2. The evaluation of the survey results is focusing on time spent in manual tasks done with computers that are closely related to reporting, data management or anything that requires manual work done from at least one system to another.
Out of the 26 people who answered, two-thirds of them work only with the computer when they work on operative projects. The majority of their tasks with the computer relates to communication, for example, emails, skype meetings and chatting with other people. About one-third of the time, time was spent on either reporting, data management or design work.
Reporting, managing data and managing files were the predefined focus categories.
“Other category 1, 2 and 3” were used to find out if there were something else than predefined categories that would be considered relevant for the topic.
According to the participants, they were using 3.6 hours on average, every week, on reporting. On managing data, they were using even more time, 4,7 hours on average per week. On average, they were managing files for 1,9 hours per week. Participants reported in ‘other category 1’ that they spent 4,7 hours on average per week. There were three answers to this category and only one description was interesting considering the topic. This single answer was 2.8 hours used to manage hours from the customer system to The Company system. Figures are collected in Table 4.
Table 4. Average hours used on a task (survey question 3).
CATEGORY AVERAGE HOURS USED
Reading and writing emails 1,14
Attending online meetings 2,05
Talking or chatting with other people. (Skype or similar) 0,88
Using design software 8,93
Initializing and creating reports 3,63
Managing data 4,67
Managing files 1,86
‘Other category 1’ 4,67 (2,8)
Participants were asked which task they think is useless, unnecessary or menial to them.
They could select 1 to 3 items. Out of 24 answers, 46% selected file management, 25%
selected initializing and creating reports and 17% selected data management. Three participants selected ‘other category’, but none of the descriptions were interesting to this study. Table 5 lists all the categories from highest to lowest.
Table 5. Tasks that seem useless, unnecessary or menial (survey question 10).
CATEGORY NUMBER OF
SELECTIONS
PERCENT OF ALL ANSWERS
Reading and writing emails 2 8.33%
Attending online meetings 2 8,33%
Talking or chatting with other people. (Skype or similar) 0
Using design software 3 12,5%
Initializing and creating reports 6 25%
Managing data 4 16,67%
Managing files 11 45,83%
‘Other category 1’ 3 12,5%
As a last question, participants were asked to describe at least one task that they thought should be automated. These answers are listed in Table 6 (irrelevant answers are left out).
The list in Table 6, agrees with the previous finding that tasks related to reporting are those that participants feel that should or could be automated. Some of the answers do not seem to be descriptions of what has been done, but merely something that participants think should be done. Those types of answers were included in the list if they belonged to project management.
Table 6. Description of tasks that participants think should be automated (survey question 21).
TASK DESCRIPTION
Project input would be available from the original document to design basis + other designer inputs, basically with one button click, instead of copy-pasting the same text in several documents.
All financial and workload -related reports should be able to produce in ERP.
Moving data, e.g., estimation info from software to other to enable resource level follow up and workload.
Comparison of reports.
Dashboard view of ongoing activities.
The status reporting of documents should be automated. The person in charge of the document has one place to fill in the status etc. Anyone who wants to know the status can request an automated report from the system.
Adding resources to ERP
Better templates for project management documentation.
Data collection and manipulation can be automated to a larger extent
Progress could be automatically filled as per hours spent and then these to be checked. In case progress is less, changelog to fill.
Reporting Project follow up based on used hours (project progress). Schedule follow-up (possible to define per task or project)
Creating reports could be simplified significantly with the right templates and database filled correctly by everybody in the team
Maybe project reporting, resourcing could be more automated in some way.
Progress as per milestones
When working on multi-discipline projects, an email or a file is read by several people and then classified and stored by all recipients (normally) several times. On important projects the corresponding time can be colossal due to the thousands of emails we receive.